First they had to revisit the scene of the crime by watching themselves on game video, a low-light reel of errors and ineptitude.

Then the Leafs were put through a grinding Sunday morning practice of drill-spit-and-repeat.

And finally the players, still abashed over their collectively god-awful performance in a 7-1 hammering by the New York Rangers the night before, were whistle-prompted for 20 minutes of hard skating sprints that burned their lungs.

This was punishment as much as instruction, a whack across the head after getting an earful from Randy Carlyle post-game and pre-practice.

The only Leafs to escape the worst of it were David Clarkson and Carl Gunnarsson, who never made it onto the ice, nursing injuries from the previous evening. Clarkson took a slapshot off his ankle. Nothing looks broken. Gunnarsson fell awkwardly and suffered a bone bruise. He’s scheduled for an MRI on Monday.

Having eight defencemen on the roster, with last week’s acquisition of Tim Gleason, looks suddenly heaven-sent, a slim silver lining.

That triggered new-look D-combinations at practice, with Carlyle still hopeful Gunnarsson will be able to dress Tuesday. A back end boasting a teenage rookie and a 23-year-old with 96 NHL games of experience — Morgan Rielly and Jake Gardiner — as key components is cause for concern, especially if the reliable Gunnarsson is out for any period of time.

“He plays the hardest minutes on the team,” Gardiner said of the quiet-spoken Swedish veteran who rarely finds a clutch of reporters at his locker. “He plays against the top lines, penalty-kills first unit. It’s hard to lose a guy like that.

“You watch a guy like Gunnarsson, how good his body position is all the time. He and (Dion) Phaneuf do it great. That’s something all our defencemen are trying to work on, even our forwards in the defensive zone.”

Gardiner, with his immense potential and rushing gifts, has absorbed his share of nagging from Carlyle. Rielly has been in and out of the lineup, kept with the club when he might have been loaned to the national junior squad that came up short again at worlds. Rielly watched two periods of Sunday’s loss in the bronze-medal game with Russia.

“It’s tough. I was in that spot last year. It’s not easy to play for the bronze medal. It’s hard to get up for that one.”

Carlyle needs to walk a fine line with his young blue-liners, instructing and criticizing but not crushing or driving them into conniptions of self-doubt. Preferably, said the coach, he would like to distribute ice-time minutes judicially. He’s fretful, in particular, about the stamina of a Rielly, who’s never before had to cope with an 82-game schedule.

“We’ve got to do a better job in supporting our younger players and not exposing them so much. When you have injuries in a game, lose a player, it forces people to play up in the lineup. Those are things that you’ve got to monitor, make sure that your younger players are not getting beaten down to a point where they can’t perform.”

On Saturday, while every Leaf struggled or simply failed to engage, the lapses by Gardiner and Reilly were acutely evident. Just about every shift felt like Groundhog Day, with missed defensive coverage, failures to clear the puck safely and Rangers blowing by them.

“It’s an issue where you’ve got to get back, focus on just moving the puck, get up and close gaps,” said Carlyle. “What happens when you’re receiving the game, you’re standing back, you’re tentative. The next pass you make hits the shaft of a stick, it hits the toe of the opposition player and it kind of multiplies — that snowball effect.

“It’s hard for young players to stop that snowball but that’s what they have to do. They have to live it, they have to survive it, and then they have to work themselves through it.”

Gardiner counters that they tried, honest. “It seemed like everything was going wrong for us and we couldn’t recover. The errors just kept piling up. It ended badly.”

It is inexplicable how Toronto could come up so flat in a four-point game that brought New York within three points of catching the Leafs in the Eastern Conference.

Pointing fingers at a brace of goaltenders who were equally unimpressive — sharing the 50-shot barrage — would be unfair. Suffice to say that on a night when the crowd was so obviously primed to hug their team, just returned from the frigid rigours of the Winter Classic, there was zero reason to show the love. So the fans booed, lustily, from the end of the first to the end of 60 torturous minutes.

With a core group signed up long-term, however, this is the team that Toronto will be going with for the rest of the season and beyond, unless a monstrous trade is orchestrated by GM Dave Nonis, who was scouting over the weekend and thus did not witness the ugliness that unfolded at the Air Canada Centre.

Yes, it’s history. And the Leafs have come up with more than a few clunkers thus far this year. But there are ramifications from such a rout. Will the Leafs emerge wiser from the ashes?

On Saturday night, New York president/GM Glen Sather was in the elevator with a crush of reporters when he offered, unsolicited, an opinion about his own club: “Different as day and night. Hard to figure.”

Sather was referring to the Rangers’ 5-2 clubbing by the Penguins the previous evening. In their case, a team meeting and some soul searching had the intended effect. It remains to be seen whether the Leafs can pull off the same jolting reversal against the visiting Islanders on Tuesday.

“We watched the Rangers play the night before in Pittsburgh,” said Carlyle. “It was like they lost in that game and then won every battle in the game they played against us. You could tell right from the opening faceoff — they won the faceoff, they had three guys in on the forecheck, they attacked and they were relentless in their attack all night.”

Back to the drawing board, Carlyle had observed, displeased and perplexed by how precipitously bad Toronto had been, just when it looked as if they’d figured out a few things over the past fortnight, amassing points in six straight matches and three wins in a row.

“We talked,” said the coach. “We’ve had those conversations before and we’ll continue to have them. Because we have played a better brand over the last little while.

“It just kind of hits you between the ears (Saturday) night — that’s not what we’re about.”

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